Where I Come From, Where I’m Going
By Adrian Martin
Published in [in]Transition, 1.3, 2014
— para Cris —
Where I Come From, Where I’m Going from A. Martin & C. Álvarez López on Vimeo.
(Voice script for audiovisual essay)
When I was fourteen years old, I drew up a list of films I needed to see as a budding cinephile — and then I scoured the columns of the Australian TV guide each week, waiting for them to appear.
So, one night, I set an alarm for three a.m., tiptoed to the lounge room and watched Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night on my parents’ small, black-and-white television, with the volume turned down very low.
About one hundred minutes later, happy and satisfied, I went back to bed. But when I awoke again to go to school the next day, I had forgotten absolutely every detail of the film. It had vanished like a dream in the night. All I knew was that I had liked it, and that it had left a strong, melancholic feeling in me.
I saw They Live By Night perhaps three or four further times over the next thirty-five years. Yet, each time — as if cursed by that initial, nocturnal viewing — I had real trouble holding the details of the film in my memory. It has proven hard, even impossible for me to recall. It turned into a permanent blur.
Intriguingly, I am not the only cinephile to experience weird disturbances of memory in relation to They Live By Night. French philosopher Jacques Rancière recounts how he rewatched the film in order to relive a particular, “overwhelming” moment in it — but as he discovered: “I couldn’t find this shot because it doesn’t exist”.
What Rancière went back to re-find was a powerful, introductory image he had remembered of a singular woman: the character of Keechie, played by Cathy O’Donnell. What he then discovered was really this: a figure of indeterminate gender, her facial features obscured, revealed little by little in the course of the first encounter between her and Bowie, played by Farley Granger.
How different this is to Robert Altman’s casual introduction of the same character, twenty-seven years later, in his adaptation of the same novel, Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us — where Keechie is simply real, unglamorous, just another piece of the overall mise en scène.
Rancière realised, upon examining Nicholas Ray’s film, that Keechie is a poetic figure precisely because she is ‘not quite all there’: she has been removed from Old Hollywood’s conventions of stereotypical representation, as well as from the later New Hollywood code of realism. That’s no doubt the same reason why Jean-Luc Godard fixed on these shots of Keechie for his Histoire(s) du cinéma, for their singular strangeness and beauty, marking for him what he calls “a true beginning of artistic montage”.
In 2014, I finally decided to really try to get They Live By Night into my head, once and for all — by teaching it. So I started watching it again, pen in hand — and was instantly startled by something I had never before realised was always present in its famous opening moments.
Isn’t that music the main, theme song from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film I Know Where I’m Going?
I Know Where I’m Going, a film that has long counted among my all-time favourites, seen and re-seen and studied many times over. A film that expresses for me (I’m not exaggerating) something of the Utopia of what love is, in all its dimensions: emotional, sensual, ethical. A film with electrifying moments like this …
How could I have never heard, across all these years, that They Live By Night uses the tune that gives its very title to Powell and Pressburger’s film?
So I started concentrating on the musical score of They Live By Night. It’s no accident: this tune, “I Know Where I’m Going”, appears, in various arrangements and modulations, and in large chunks, no less than eight times across the entire length of the film — including in its prologue and over its final credits. In fact, it is the major — and uncredited — melody in Leigh Harline’s score.
At one point, a Christmas medley is emitted from a radio; it begins with “O Come All Ye Faithful” (or “Adeste Fidelis”), a hymn I used to sing and play on a church harmonium during Catholic Mass, also when I was fourteen years old. Now, “O Come All Ye Faithful” itself can easily be superimposed over “I Know Where I’m Going” …
This whole concept built around the song “I Know Where I’m Going” must have come from Nicholas Ray, who had a well-developed musical sense. His association with the song was no doubt particular, perhaps personal. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Ray had worked with John and Alan Lomax, recording folk songs throughout America’s heartland for the Library of Congress; these experiences also formed the basis for a regular, beloved radio program they made, called Back Where I Come From.
Now, strictly, the folk ballad “I Know Where I’m Going” is of traditional Scottish or Irish origin (and Powell and Pressburger’s film is set in Scotland). But music traditions recognise no national boundaries. In America, “I Know Where I’m Going” was a hit for Burl Ives in 1941 on his debut album. It was recorded by many subsequent performers including Odetta, Harry Belafonte and Judy Collins.
Burl Ives had appeared on Ray’s folk radio program at Christmas 1940. Seventeen years after his first hit, he acted in a film by Ray, the ecological, rural melodrama Wind Across the Everglades. It is said that, each night, he spontaneously entertained the cast and crew with a concert of folk songs. Did he sing to them, I wonder, “I Know Where I’m Going”?
Let us return to the mystery of coincidence of these two films, They Live By Night and I Know Where I’m Going — both of which play a significant part in my formation as a cinephile. Powell and Pressburger’s movie appeared in 1945. Ray shot his film in 1947; it was released first in London in 1948 — where it garnered a positive review from his future screenwriter and lover, Gavin Lambert — and then in the U.S., belatedly, in 1949. There is no sign that Ray saw or knew the Powell-Pressburger film in the 1940s, or ever.
The use of music in They Live By Night is quite remarkable. After its prologue, except for brief bursts of diegetic radio, the film has no music at all for over thirty minutes; and the score is generally sparsely laid on, for a feature of only ninety-five minutes. Many scenes glaringly lack the kind of Hollywood underscore music you would typically expect.
The sound and music design devised by Ray is systematic and crystal-clear, once you are listening for it. The bleak, Depression-era milieu of poverty and violence and theft has no real music, except (for example) the banal, functional, mercenary drone of a cheap, quick-wedding harmonium.
It is very characteristic of Nicholas Ray’s cinema that the only real music is the lovers’ music, the score that envelops Keechie and Bowie’s fleeting, ever-endangered moments of tender and erotic intimacy.
Who knows why, finally, Ray chose and borrowed, as the melody for this romance, the tune of the folk song “I Know Where I’m Going”? Its standard lyrics do not appear in They Live By Night:
I know where I’m going
And I know who’s going with me
I know who I love
But the dear knows who I’ll marry.
But the title of the song does work its way, unmistakably and pointedly, into the film’s dialogue.
This plot reference, however, is a bit paradoxical: as the scholar Ria Banerjee has pointed out, if there’s one thing that these ‘lovers by night’ do not know, it’s where they are going, or how they are going to get there — and in the fatalistic course of the story, they never do get there.
But what Keechie and Bowie do know — and this is what the song’s lyrics essentially say — is that they love each other fiercely, and are pledged to each other, unto death.
Where am I going with this?
The music that connects these films reveals to me the two, Janus faces of the Romanticism which, I realise, is such a predominant part of my own cinephilic personality and experience (and probably not mine alone). In the Ray film, there is a doomed love, doomed by the world interrupting all the time, that nonetheless shines and sings at each, ephemeral moment that it exists on screen.
This is a depiction of love that avoids the codes — social and cinematic codes — and forms itself in the precious cracks, the interruptions or suspensions of the narrative.
Powell and Pressburger’s film, by contrast, is a much tighter narrative machine, and gloriously so. It leads its main characters along a twisted path, bringing them ultimately face to face with a recognition of love’s meaning for them.
In my psyche, I think this was a more palatable, more reassuring, and certainly more optimistic lesson in love than the one formulated by Nicholas Ray.
Maybe that’s why I’ve never forgotten one of these films, while I immediately forgot the other.
© Adrian Martin August 2014
Biographical note
Adrian Martin is Professor of Film Studies at Goethe University (Frankfurt), and Monash University (Melbourne). He is published internationally and has been translated into over twenty languages, with regular columns in De Filmkrant (Holland) and Caimán (Spain). He is the author of six books (Phantasms, Once Upon a Time in America, Raúl Ruiz: Magnificent Obsessions, The Mad Max Movies, Last Day Every Day, What is Modern Cinema?) and is Co-Editor of the online film journals LOLA and Screening the Past, as well as the books Movie Mutations and Raúl Ruiz: Images of Passage.